No exit from the special relationship

I spent much of October writing a long piece for Middle East Policy, provoked in part by a college age daughter’s question about the utility of Israel as a strategic ally. (She was wearying of arguing the moral rights and wrongs of Zionists and Palestinians in the Holy Land.) It can be found here . For me the most illuminating part of the research was reading Jonathan Cook’s fine book on Israel and the Clash of Civilizations, which I think extends our knowledge a lot about the run-up to the Iraq war. In any case, I come to fairly pessimistic conclusions, but I hope some of you check out the essay anyway.

An excellent, necessary article, Dr. McConnell. Measured, thoughtful, rich in fact and analysis. The long-burning anger that attends this subject must be tempered by works like this, but that anger will surely live and grow as years and poltiical administrations pass with no substantial change in this terribly destructive “special relationship”.

It has been damaging us for decades. Since 9/11 it has been literally killing us. It must be ended.

The kind of work evident in your article is grounds for hope that it will. Many thanks.

Scott,
This is a lucid, forceful, and well argued piece. I learned a great deal from reading it. The comparison of the Israeli-American special relationship to the older one with Britain is particularly illuminating. And it is interesting that the neoconservatives themselves draw such comparisons. In fact they wish to have the American relation to Israel working in tandem with the Anglosphere and its democratic universalist values. They’re trying to keep both special relationships going at the same time.

One of the most interesting questions you raise in that article regards Israel-as-rational-actor.

If I were a European I wouldn’t be too happy about Israel’s nukes and other WMDs. The country is increasingly dominated by fanatics whose fantasies are abetted by the US failure to impose any discipline on its largest international welfare client.

In fact, as you suggest in your article, NATO could well find itself confronted with an Israel that resembles North Korea on steroids, one that, thanks to our own stupidity, is in a position to make very lucrative deals with our strategic competitors.

I hope we are keeping just as close an eye on the very real Israeli WMDs as we do on the ones the Israelis encourage us to imagine in other unstable, potentially hostile states.

In the article you state that:
“The point is that if Iran managed to develop one or two nuclear weapons, they wouldn’t use them to deter an attack on themselves, but would immediately strike Israel. Their messianic ideology makes Iranian leaders ready to sacrifice one half of their population, Israeli “experts” are said to believe.” That is merely a rehash of the line used by VP Cheney in the run-up to the Iraq War: “If Saddam Hussein were to acquire a nuclear weapon in the morning, he would use it by the afternoon.” As we know, Saddam Hussein was so suicidal that we found him, unkempt and lice-ridden, hiding in a spider-hole six months after we invaded Iraq.

Ironically, it turns out (as BLine noted earlier) that it is our concern that it is Israel which is the irrational actor in the neighborhood that compels us to subsidize the relatively high standard of living of Israeli Jews. I guess that means that U.S. taxpayers will be condemned to pour billions more into Israel “in perpetuity,” which just happens to be the same time-frame Senator Lindsey Graham contemplates for two U.S. air bases in Afghanistan. One possible solution is extending the Hillary Clinton doctrine from Iran to Israel. During the 2008 campaign, she declared that, if Iran were to launch a nuclear weapon at Israel, the U.S. would “annihilate” Iran, although we have absolutely no treaty obligations to do so. We could always make clear to Israel that, if it were to launch nuclear weapons against another country, we would annihilate Israel.

Thanks for everyone’s comments, and reading through a long piece in an era of shortened attention spans and wikileaks. Even though I now read tons of stuff about this subject, when you begin researching you find out that there are serious academics who are way, way ahead of you. So there always appears some danger of making a complete fool of oneself.

So there is some acceptance within the US intelligentsia that Israel serves absolutely no US interest, in fact it’s detrimental to US interests? But then they reason that support for Israel is down to a need to keep them on a leash. So basically, the most powerful country the world has ever seen is being successfully blackmailed by a country of only 3.5 million? And I thought Americans take pride in their “kick-ass” attitude!

I read the piece last night, and I share the opinion of other’s here. It is solidly well-written, and cannot be dismissed as simply some conspiracy theory. When comparing the Israel-U.S. relationship to the U.K.-U.S. relationship, the difference that struck out for me is that at least the British have fought alongside us. Israeli troops have never contributed to a single American military operation. In intelligence matter, Israel’s value can be seen in the fact that they have not captured a single Al Qaeda operative, while the Arabs and Pakistanis have caught numerous suspects and handed them over to us.

Given Israel’s poor fighting performance against Hezbollah in 2006, and their weak response to the wildfires that have killed over 40 people this week near Haifa, it is hard to see how Israeli capabilities would be useful to the U.S. They cannot seem to organize any large scale endeavor, unless American taxpayers are on the hook.

Even Jeffrey Goldberg (over at The Atlantic) posts a letter from a reader who asks simply, if Israel, a wealthy nation, cannot contain a wildfire that has killed dozens, how would it be able to organize rescue teams in the event of an Iranian missile barrage after Israel attacks its nuclear sites?

BTW – Israeli rescue teams performed exceptionally well in Haiti. It seems that Israel is quite good at projects involving their most talented individuals, whether it is rescue teams or hit squads. BUt, in efforts involving the nation as a whole, Israel is rather ordinary.